Onde Team!
It was a week of finishing up some work with Job Owners that took a few weeks longer than I anticipated. We didn’t get to see LZ or ZA contribute this week due to other commitments they had but both of them have suggested that they will be re-engaged in prospecting for new job owners in the coming week.
Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.
Since our last update we were able to place a handful of workers in jobs and continue to onboard existing workers that had not completed their steps yet. Over the next few days Lisa and I will be working to post our Facebook ads and will look to continue attracting workers to our platform. MB was helpful this week working with one worker in particular who may have landed a permanent position with a new Job Owner.
Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers
I focused this week on getting through the rest of LZ and ZA’s leads which included setting up Job Owner Profiles for them. As of yesterday, we have 139 profiles for Job Owners that have indicated they need workers and are interested in OndeWork. Both LZ and ZA will be contacting each of their prospective Job Owners to ask if they have any upcoming jobs that require workers. We now have a systematic process for finding job owners, creating a profile for them that they can access any time to see which workers match their profile and now need to focus on onboarding them into their first job posting.
To help with the last step, I have reached out to several larger companies to begin the conversation of trying OndeWork on a pilot program basis to see if we can help make a difference in their labour shortage problems. This sales cycle will be longer than the small job owners we have now as they have more layers of approvals and bureaucracy to work through before being able to consider OndeWork. I met in person with a larger construction company that will be trying us out in the next couple of weeks and currently use three (3) different agencies to help them find low-skilled workers for their projects.
A few observations from this week:
1) Most of the Job Owners we are currently working with are small business owners that don’t have a dedicated person responsible for hiring. Many decisions are made in the moment which makes planning ahead difficult. This means that OndeWork needs to continue to be seen as an easy and simple way to quickly secure the workers they need.
2) The behaviour of swiping a credit card and getting workers is quite different compared to existing alternatives. With a job board, a Job Owner pays for an ad and expects to receive and review resumes. With an agency, a Job Owner expects to make a phone call or send an email and get a worker with an invoice following at the end of the month. With OndeWork, swiping a credit card and getting a worker seems too simple. I am not sure what do to about this other than to take testimonials and use them to create trust.
I have also begun sending out our pitch deck to see what kind of responses are given from companies that fund companies in our position. This will be a weekly and continual exercise and I work through what we need to do to grow and hit our goals. I believe that once we have addressed points 1 and 2 above we will be in a position to grow in a meaningful way.
Have a great weekend everyone!
DG
